Pervez Musharraf was one of Pakistan’s better dictators
A protagonist in the war on terror, the former generalissimo died in Dubai on February 5th
When Pervez Musharraf was appointed army chief of Pakistan in 1998, he was considered a surprising choice. A hot-headed former artilleryman, with a reputation for bravery under Indian fire and occasional indiscipline, he was number three on a list of generals that Nawaz Sharif, then prime minister, had been given to pick from. He was also an outlier in a top brass dominated by ethnic Punjabis and Pushtuns. Mr Musharraf hailed from the southern Pakistani city of Karachi; his Urdu-speaking family had migrated there in 1947 from Delhi, where he was born. Mr Sharif, it was clear, envisaged Mr Musharraf as a weak army chief whom he could control.
This was a familiar ploy of put-upon Pakistani civilian leaders. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had applied the same logic when appointing Muhammad Zia ul-Haq army chief in 1976. But Zia promptly removed Bhutto in a coup, hanged him, and ruled Pakistan until he was killed in a mysterious plane crash in 1988. Mr Sharif, it soon transpired, had similarly underestimated Mr Musharraf. The general toppled Mr Sharif in a coup in 1999, had him sentenced to life in prison and ruled Pakistan, first as “chief executive” and then as president, until his resignation in 2008.
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Mr Musharraf’s decade in power also followed a similar pattern to Zia’s. Following a period of civilian misrule, Mr Musharraf stabilised the economy, passed liberal reforms, raised the growth rate and was championed by investors at home and abroad. Also like Zia, Mr Musharraf’s rule coincided with a momentous event in next-door Afghanistan that would present a huge test of his leadership and transform Pakistan’s place in the world.
In Zia’s case this was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan of 1979. In Mr Musharraf’s, it was the al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11, carried out by Afghanistan-based veterans of the anti-Soviet liberation struggle that Zia had organised on America’s behalf. Mr Musharraf’s decision to co-operate with America in the war on terror that followed made him one of its most important allies. America—which had cut off aid to Pakistan in the 1990s—authorised $18bn in military and non-military support for the country between 2002 and 2011. Mr Musharraf was hailed by George W. Bush as a “strong defender of freedom”. “In the Line of Fire”, a vainglorious autobiography the general published in 2006, surged on to the New York Times bestseller list.
Yet politically, Mr Musharraf faced essentially the opposite challenge to Zia. Running the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan had given Zia, with American acquiescence, an opportunity to accelerate his pre-existing efforts to shift Pakistan to the Islamic right. It helped rally Pakistani public opinion behind jihad. It provided well-trained Islamist recruits for the proxy war that Pakistan’s generals would soon launch against India in Kashmir. By contrast, in siding with America against jihadism, in Afghanistan and beyond, Mr Musharraf went against Pakistani opinion, including within the army, which continued to succour many of its former Islamist militant proxies, even as Mr Musharraf denounced them.
America had given him little alternative: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” Mr Bush had said. But Mr Musharraf’s turn against extremism was also a matter of personal conviction. Unlike the pious Zia, he was a whisky-drinking moderate with an eye for the ladies. Having spent much of his childhood in Turkey, where his father was stationed as a diplomat, Mr Musharraf was a lifelong fan of Kemal Ataturk, its great secular reformer. Early in his army career his love of Pakistani rock music and Western fashions earned him the nickname “Cowboy”. As Pakistan’s ruler, he claimed to be pushing a programme of “enlightened moderation”.
Mr Musharraf liberalised Pakistan’s media, encouraged pop culture and passed measures to protect women from the chauvinist Islamist legal regime that Zia had built. In tandem with two Indian prime ministers, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and then Manmohan Singh, he also launched a bold and imaginative peace process that would come unprecedentedly close to settling the South Asian rivals’ differences.
But the pushback was fierce. Mr Musharraf was publicly reviled as an American puppet and the target of multiple assassination plots. At the same time the contradictions in his position, as an enlightened dictator and moderate leader of an Islamicised army, made him at best a qualified reformer and unreliable American ally.
The spurt of economic growth Mr Musharraf oversaw came at the cost of the democratic institutions he suborned, including the constitution and courts. His campaign against militancy was undercut by the very Islamist political parties that he championed to counter his mainstream democratic opponents. It was also undermined by the army. After leaving office Mr Musharraf came close to admitting what had long been heavily suspected—that, while fighting militants at home, Pakistan’s generals had continued to offer tacit support to the Afghan Taliban even as they were killing American and allied troops.
By 2007 the contradictions in Mr Musharraf’s relatively enlightened dictatorship had become unsustainable. Pakistan was being ravaged by terrorism. The limited democracy he had allowed had led to mass protests against his rule. His foremost democratic opponents, Mr Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, were back on the campaign trail. Calling himself “indispensable”, Mr Musharraf briefly declared a state of emergency and suspended the constitution. But his army comrades, and the Americans, were growing tired of the disorder, especially after Ms Bhutto was assassinated shortly afterwards. When Mr Musharraf’s opponents won an election in 2008 he resigned the presidency and fled to London rather than face impeachment proceedings. The new government promptly overturned many of his legal and constitutional changes.
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Mr Musharraf remained a player in Pakistan’s political drama. Soon bored of the American speaker circuit—where he earned top dollar for inveighing against Islamic extremism—he started plotting a route back to power. He returned to Pakistan in 2013, but met with little popular support and a barrage of lawsuits. He was disqualified from running for election and held under house arrest on multiple charges, including complicity in Ms Bhutto’s killing. He survived at least one more assassination attempt himself before, in 2016, the army arranged for him to leave for medical attention in Dubai. He was convicted of treason and sentenced to death in absentia, a verdict that was later overturned. Increasingly beset by ill health, he never returned to Pakistan.
It is partly an indictment of Mr Musharraf’s successors that his dictatorship is remembered fondly by many Pakistanis today. No successor has come close to repeating the seriousness of his peacemaking with India. He also left some positive marks on Pakistan. His liberalisation of its media is an enduring success. Perhaps most of all, Mr Musharraf was synonymous with a time when Pakistan was enormously important geopolitically, something that few Pakistanis appreciated until the opportunity that this presented had passed.
For all his shortcomings, Mr Musharraf did try to turn Pakistan’s strategic relevance to his country’s advantage. But his reactionary opponents, military and civilian, sponsors of militancy and disorder, squandered the chance. And it may never come again. Whatever the merits of Pakistan’s next military dictator, he is unlikely to be feted in Washington, dc, as Mr Musharraf often was.
Published in The Economist February 5th, 2023